BRUSH WITH FATE

‘Never Look Away’ from soaring, soapish tale

“N ever Look Away,” a threehour, Oscarnominated German-language film from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (“The Lives of Others”), is a bit of a gorgeous oddity.

Ostensibly a biographical film based “loosely” (actually not very loosely) on the life of eclectic German artist Gerhard Richter, the film begins in 1937 with a drama- tization of a Nazi “degenerate art” exhibit in Dresden visited by a boy, the film’s artist protagonist, who is named Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling as an adult).

The boy attends the exhibit with his beloved but dangerously free-spirited aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), who will become a victim of the Nazi eugenics program and who tells her nephew to “never look away.” She becomes his lifelong muse.

As a young art student in postwar East Germany, Kurt falls in love with beautiful Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer), whose dominating father, Carl Seeband (the aristocratic Sebastian Koch of “The Lives of Others”), was the SS doctor in charge of the Dresden-area eugenics program during the war and condemned Elisabeth to death.

In the years before the Berlin Wall, Kurt wearies of the dogmatic Socialist Realism form of Communist-sanctioned art, and he and Ellie escape to West Germany, where Kurt experiences artistic freedom for the first time (this includes paintings that reflect Richter’s blurred photo-realism period), and his career takes spiritual and professional flight.

Nominated for both foreign language and cinematography (American Caleb Deschanel), “Never Look Away,” which has been disowned by Richter, is a return to a German historical subject after Donnersmarck’s brief fling with Hollywood in the form of a 2010 Johnny Depp-Angelina Jolie flop named “The Tourist.”

“Never Look Away” is certainly an improvement on “The Tourist,” and Schilling makes being an artist seem like a source of great joy and playful intellectualism, even in the most difficult circumstances. But “Never Look Away” often seems like a glorified soap opera.

(“Never Look Away” contains nudity, sexually suggestive scenes and violence.) — james.verniere@bostonherald.com

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST: Tom Schilling stars as a man driven to become an artist. Cai Cohrs, below, plays the character as a young boy in Nazi Germany.